Last week, the Advance published a photo of yellow school buses parked alongside Paulo Intermediate School in Huguenot. Several kids are seen walking past the buses that once brought them home safely.

Since only sixth-graders are now allowed on board, most buses had only 15 or so students when they departed and some had as few as five. The seventh- and eighth-graders were left to fend for themselves, on perilous commutes unique to Staten Island, even when those mostly-empty buses were headed near, or even right past their homes.

A variance to pupil transportation rules, adopted by city educational officials in 1968, had allowed about 3,000 middle school students here to ride the yellow buses.

When, on May 20, 2010, the Advance reported that the Department of Education (DOE) planned to rescind the variance, the agency insisted that the move was necessitated by a projected $500-million shortfall in state funding for public schools.

Matthew Mittenthal, the DOE’S deputy press secretary, claimed that the variance had to be eliminated “to spare our classrooms from the state’s severe budget cuts.”

Similarly, at a court proceeding brought by local parents and politicians to reinstate the variance, DOE witnesses repeatedly sought to justify rescinding it on budgetary considerations. This even though, in an embarrassing succession of blatant contradictions, they couldn’t agree on how much money, if any, would actually be saved by the move.

That debacle reached knee-slapping proportions when an e-mail from Stephanie Keating, a chief administrative officer in the DOE’s operations office, revealed that the city might actually lose money by eliminating the variance because of the cost of providing the displaced seventh- and eighth-graders with MetroCards.

After state Supreme Court Justice John Fusco found that the DOE had acted arbitrarily and capriciously, and ordered the variance reinstated, an irate Mayor Bloomberg bellowed, “We have to balance the budget, and sometimes the judges just don’t understand.”

Seeking to overturn Judge Fusco’s order in the Appellate Division, the DOE asserted that it has wide discretion to manage its budget and assure that public funds are fairly spent.

In reality, however, the fairness issue was only mentioned tangentially in the hearing before Judge Fusco.

It came during the budget-related testimony of Matthew Berlin, Executive Director of the Department of Education’s Office of Pupil Transportation, when he said, “I believe it is not a fair use of public funds to bus seventh and eighth-graders on Staten Island. Even if it cost a dollar.”

Notice that he didn’t claim the variance was illegal, only unfair.

LIKE CIRCUMSTANCES

In its decision overturning Judge Fusco’s order, the Appellate Division cited the agency’s discretion to decide “how revenues are to be expended.”

Although it’s been repeatedly misrepresented to the contrary, the court neither held nor even implied that the Staten Island variance violated the Education Law’s requirement that equal transportation be provided to students “in like circumstances.”

On the contrary, while deferring to the DOE’s discretion on budgetary matters, the court emphasized that “one might rationally question the wisdom of the approach that the DOE took.”

Nevertheless, appearing at Susan Wagner High School on Sept. 8, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott categorically ruled out restoring school bus service to Staten Island’s seventh- and eighth-graders with this absurd assertion: “There’s something called ‘like circumstances.’ If we restore yellow buses here, then the entire city is entitled to that.”

Incredibly, although Walcott’s assertion is demonstrably false, he continues to tout it as the applicable law. Even worse, it’s being used to provide political cover for the DOE while that agency continues to jeopardize the safety of Staten Island’s middle school students.

There is a way, though, to get Walcott off his “like circumstances” kick.

Somebody just has to ask him this: “So, Mr. Walcott, are you saying that for all those years the Department of Education was illegally using state funds to finance the Staten Island variance?”

You see, far from being a recent amendment, that clause has been a fixture of the Education Law for years.

Further exposing the “like circumstances” argument as a recent fabrication are those six solid months following the DOE’s rescission of the variance, a half-year when the only explanation offered by the agency for its action was budgetary necessity.

Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D. Mid-Island) and Staten Island state Sen. Andrew Lanza, a Republican, have introduced legislation that would essentially call the DOE’s bluff by exempting cities with a population of one million from the “like circumstances” requirement.

“It has been expressed to us that ‘like circumstances’ is the major issue for the city,” Cusick told me over the weekend. “With this legislation we give them the opportunity to provide the necessary bus service.”

If the DOE is looking for a face-saving opportunity, he could be right.

But I seriously doubt it.

This continuing crisis for Staten Island’s middle school kids began with the raw exercise of political power by city officials. When challenged by the community, they responded with a swashbuckling, deceitful, win-at-any-cost defense of it.

They’ve consciously placed young children in harm’s way.

And they simply don’t care.

[Daniel Leddy’s column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page. His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com.]